There has been growing enthusiasm in recent months about using artificial intelligence (AI), particularly within the advertising industry. So much so that LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing Benchmark report recently found that “3 out of 4 B2B marketing leaders plan to start or continue using generative AI.” And that “B2B marketing leaders are beginning to realize that emerging technologies, such as generative AI, will help them to deliver more impactful, personalized campaigns.”
The report also mentioned that “generative AI has the highest predicted usage increase for the next year among B2B marketing leaders who currently use the technology.”
Image source: The B2B Marketing Benchmark
But as much as this enthusiasm has grown, only 17% of marketing leaders say that they have an “extremely good understanding” of AI marketing and its techniques. This comes as no surprise, given that we are still in the early stages of learning these new technologies and unlocking their business potential.
Important AI trends to look out for
The B2B landscape is shifting quickly as AI becomes more and more prevalent within the advertising industry. With that in mind, here is a summary of essential AI trends to look out for as a B2B marketer below.
Significant growth
There is gaining interest in artificial intelligence among B2B marketers and their audiences, as seen in the graph below, with a 142% increase in LinkedIn posts from well-respected B2B marketers discussing artificial intelligence. This has likely been due to the recent spike in the popularity of ChatGPT.
Image source: The B2B Marketing Benchmark
AI skills are becoming increasingly in demand
There is a high probability of artificial intelligence or machine learning (ML) becoming a sought-after skill and much needed in the job market. It’s been rising steadily in the past five years, as seen below.
Image source: The B2B Marketing Benchmark
Marketers who prioritise learning the fundamentals of prompt engineering will be able to get the most out of AI and be able to use it in innovative ways.
Marketers are using AI in their creative processes
AI could aid in advertising’s next creative revolution says Jeff Beer at Fast Company. This is because automation helps to streamline many manual processes and assists teams with saving time, which allows them to concentrate more on creativity.
Artificial intelligence is also changing the way agencies work. But not in a way that is going to eliminate them, but rather in a way that people are able to have more time to be creative.
The use of these tools allows a lot of the routine tasks to be done by machines so that people can invest more time and effort into imagination and ideation rather than being held back with various elements of production that can be easily automated at a very inexpensive rate.
In this way, AI can start by doing the heavy lifting for all the grunt work of administration and operational management and clearing space for the most valuable product to date in the marketing industry, which is original thinking.
According to LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, these are the most commonly listed functional uses for AI:
- Increase efficiency so I can focus on higher-value work (58%)
- Generate more content in less time (53%)
- Create optimized and engaging content that resonates with target audience (53%)
- Build more creative campaigns (41%)
Image source: The B2B Marketing Benchmark
AI is adept at improving and enriching content creation, personalisation and creative ideation which in turn allows marketing agencies to come up with more creative, engaging and tailored marketing campaigns. This technology should, however, be used in conjunction with human expertise and should never replace human creativity.
Contextual advertising and AI ad targeting
In addition to assisting marketers with the creation and optimisation of content, AI is also able to assist with how ads are targeted through something called contextual advertising. Contextual advertising is revolutionary because it takes into account where audiences are, what they are doing and what they are interested in when being shown an ad.
By understanding audiences’ context and automating tailored content creation in a matter of seconds, advertisers are able to effectively deliver ads that are highly relevant to millions of potential customers all in one go. And this is all possible thanks to machine learning algorithms that have been trained to analyse vast amounts of data to identify all sorts of patterns and insights that would be otherwise impossible to do manually.
Conclusion
Using AI technologies to target B2B audiences more accurately and thoughtfully makes sense, and certainly seems to be the way of the future. This approach is also most likely one of the biggest keys to a successful advertising strategy. So, as you can imagine, we’re quite eager to see where these advancements may lead.
